Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Comics Reviews (October 7th, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I paid money for, sometimes reluctantly.

Avengers #0

So let’s start with why Marvel can go fuck themselves, which is releasing three $5.99 books in the same week, two of them preview books (the third being Amazing Spider-Man #1, which is what, the second one in two years?). Seriously, could none of these have been launched on last week’s super-light week? It’s not as though the preview book is a pinnacle of comic art, since a typical preview book consists of eight-pagers that have to intrdouce a premise and then not do anything with it because someone might buy issue #1 without buying the preview. Frankly, this is the sort of shit that should be being released for free online, since it’s advertising. This book is literally the reader paying to have these books marketed to them. Anyway, despite that there are some promising titles in here – I love Al Ewing’s take on America Chavez, and Uncanny Avengers actually catches my eye, not least because Duggan is good. But all that means is that the advertising was effective for other books – it doesn’t make this any less of a complete rip-off.

Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #4

Only picked up because my shop wasn’t ordering rack copies and I didn’t want to stick them with one; I’ve made up my mind to drop this cheap name cash-in due to the fact that it contains nothing that can meaningfully be described as writing. This month they’ve even done away with the bad Grant Morrison interview in the back.

Contest of Champions #1

I have high hopes for this book in spite of the problems – it’s the sort of big, fun premise Al Ewing does excellent work with, and I’m sure his crashing together bits of Marvel will be entertaining. But here’s the thing – this is a $4.99 first issue, released the same week as another $5.99 preview book framed by a Contest of Champions issue. That’s basically $11 for the first installment of a story that trumpets its “based on a free-to-play mobile game” status, which is the most transcendently perverse thing I’ve seen in comics in a long time.

Invincible Iron Man #1

The marquee book of All-New All-Different Marvel Now, a banner so shitty I notice they’re not actually putting it on the covers of things. I suppose I should thank Marvel for not charging extra for the cardstock outer cover. But man… this is bog standard Iron Man. It’s the same Iron Man that Kieron Gillen was writing, and that Matt Fraction was writing before him. Yeah, we’ve got Bendis dialogue, which suits Tony well, but this is neither new nor different. And look, in a week where Marvel has already put me in a mood that says “their books are mainly rip-offs,” having the marquee book of your latest relaunch be indistinguishable from every previous take is just… not a great idea? I mean, Jonathan Hickman said that he wanted to call Secret Wars #1 “A Great Jumping-Off Point.”…

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City of the Dead: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors

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Along with Pex Lives itself and the Shabcast, one of the podcasts Eruditorum Press picked up when we took Kevin and James onboard was Holly Boson and James Murphy’s City of the Deadpodcast, which is looking at all of the releases from Amicus Films in turn. Readers of this site probably know Amicus best for the two Peter Cushing Dalek films, but on the whole they’re better known for a series of horror anthology films that James described to me as a sort of cut-rate Hammer Horror. Today we’ve got a look at Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, a five-part anthology film featuring Peter Cushing as Dr. Terror instead of as Dr. Who, telling the awful fates of people on a train. You can grab that here.

Attentive listeners have already gotten to hear Holly back on Shabcast 12 talking about Kesha, and it’s my pleasure to give you all another dose; she’s one of the smartest voices in fandom right now, and it’s our sincere hope that she’ll be doing a lot more work for us here.…

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“Aside from his face, he’s ugly”: A Fistful of Datas

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OK, I like it.

Yes, it is very silly. It amounts to little more than an acritical genre romp done of the most obvious and easy genre the show could have possibly done (and one that happens to be deeply historically problematic to boot), and it’s even *literally* shot on a Hollywood backlot. It’s also transparently an actor showcase episode, the plot serving as little more than an excuse to get Brent Spiner to do every Spaghetti Western cliche in existence. But the thing is, this is exactly the kind of story the holodeck exists to do, and I’m *way* more OK with this sort of thing here than I am in something like “Qpid”. For one thing, it doesn’t have Q in it and isn’t aiming to do anything more serious than “Western movie riff where Worf plays the sheriff everything is Data because of some reasons”. And I can respect that.

Of course, “A Fistful of Datas” isn’t just a genre romp. It’s also an actor showcase, and one of the best in the series. It’s obviously one for Brent Spiner, so obviously in fact it’s not worth commenting on except, perhaps to say that his take on Annie would probably not play as well today as it did in 1992. Although to the episode’s credit, I got more of a Monty Python vibe from it where the point of the scene is a drag quotation of stereotypical feminine tropes and signifiers. Data is essentially a recursive performer, after all: He’s Brent Spiner doing an impersonation of an android doing an impersonation of what he thinks humanoids are like. So I think you could actually redeem that scene rather strongly by writing it back into the pre-existing notions of performance and artifice that are part of Data’s character, the holodeck’s relationship to narrative and Star Trek: The Next Generation on the whole. But as predictably outstanding as Brent Spiner is, this is an equally good outing for Michael Dorn and Marina Sirtis, and that’s easy to overlook.

(And not to be outdone, Brian Bonsall is really pretty excellent too with the material he has, and he’s just about everything the child actors in “Rascals” weren’t. As frequently poorly handled as Alexander is, it’s important to remember Bonsall is a good actor in his own right, so he deserves the same redemptive treatment we afforded Wil Wheaton.)

But for me the stars of the show tonight are Dorn and Sirtis. Not only is this the best Worf/Alexander story on television to date, it’s also the best Worf/Deanna Troi one because it plays so well to the actors’ strengths. Dorn is visibly having a blast under Worf’s awkward facade, and Sirtis finally gets to stretch her legs with Deanna Troi *as a character*. This is the first time we’ve gotten to see *Deanna* as mercurial and adaptable as *Marina* is, and she understandably knocks it out of the park. To me this is best exemplified by Durango’s accent, which isn’t Marina Sirtis doing a fakey Western accent and persona (which she could have very easily done and would have been perfectly understandable), but Marina Sirtis doing Deanna Troi (with Deanna Troi’s own inflections, mannerisms and distinctive accent) doing a fakey Western accent and persona, which is a damn laudable bit of acting if I’ve ever seen one.…

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iCompton: Dre as Apple Product

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August 7th, 2015 will presumably not join January 24th, 1984 and October 23, 2001 on the list of celebrated Apple anniversaries. This will, I suspect, be a mistake. The release of Compton (all together now, “Dr. Dre’s first new album in sixteen years”) is every bit as significant a cultural moment as the Macintosh and the iPod, even if its status as a pop moment is likely to obscure its status as a moment in the history of tech culture, and, more broadly, the way it positions Dre as the king of both Compton and Cupertino, for good and for ill.

The album is, after all, an Apple product, even if it says Aftermath/Interscope on the label. Because, of course, there wasn’t a physical label when the album was released: it was an Apple Music/iTunes Store exclusive. This is part and parcel of Dr. Dre’s newfound status as Apple executive, as was the album’s announcement, just a week before its release, on Dre’s Beats One show.

The theatricality of that move is not the only thing borrowed from Steve Jobs. Dre is working in the same role of renowned visionary overseer that Jobs occupied in his later years. Dre’s albums have always been intensely collaborative affairs, but on Compton he is less the lead artist than the CEO, serving as the drummer for decades of hip hop talent, from Ice Cube to Kendrick Lamar, to march to. Beats by Dre, if you will.

In this regard too, Dre is following in Jobs’s footsteps, with Apple’s 2014 acquisition of Beats by Dre being made in the model of its 1997 acquisition of NeXT. In 1997 they sought both to use NeXTSTEP to make up for years of stalled and inadequate modernisation of MacOS and to (re)acquire the services of Steve Jobs. In 2014, the platform past due for modernization was the iTunes Store, the acquired technology was the Beats Music service, and the executive talent was Dre.

Central to this process is the fact that Dre functions as a luxury brand. That’s the whole point of Apple Music itself, which, for all its interface foibles, still has the sense of quality design one expects from Apple, carefully chosen and immaculately kerned typefaces over lush stock photos all combining to scream “we’re classier than Spotify” as loudly as possible. But this sense of design is just as visible in Compton. A Dre album has always demanded that it be listened with an ear trained on the quality and innovation of the production. It has to be a smash hit also, but its true audience is the engaged connoisseur. With its collage of 70s funk and analogue synths, 1992’s The Chronic hinted to listeners that hip-hop’s most formidable power wasn’t revolutionary rhetoric or gun love, but a particular poise of laid-back confidence; seven years later, 2001 was a victory lap featuring the era’s top names paying Dre tribute, demonstrating the immeasurable material payoff of his approach

Or, to put it in terms of the tech buzzword du jour, Dre has always been curatorial, presenting new sounds and artists to the world so as to carefully cultivate an image as the ultimate in tastemakers.…

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The Chair Agenda

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“The Chair Agenda” refers to the symbolic use of a Chair to indicate a process of Ascension. But this rather begs the question of what we mean by “ascension” and what, if anything, chairs have to do with it. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything about chairs in of themselves that would lead us to associate them with Ascension, is there?

Which is to say, there’s nothing inherently metaphoric about this association. Unlike, say, the implicit underlying metaphor embedded in our very conception of “time-travel”: Time is conceived as a dimension of Space, and our experiences of moving through space are subsequently used to inform our relationship to time—we imagine traveling through time much like we move through space. Not that this is the only metaphor we have for understanding time. We also conceive of it as a Resource, as something to divide up, manage, and use, save, or waste.

Going back to chairs, though, there’s no obvious metaphor here.  We sit in them.  That’s it.  We can’t even say that the form of a chair motivates an interpretation of Ascension, like an Eye in the middle of a forehead easily symbolizes “insight”—of thoughtfulness, creativity, intuition, the Divine, what have you.

So why Chairs? And what, pray, tell, is Ascension? Actually, it might be easier to start with how chairs, namely the body of evidence that employs the Chair in the context of ascension. For our purposes we’ll be focusing on Doctor Who, but this particular esoteric association is not limited to the favorite text of Eruditorum Press, as we’ll see. Thankfully, the first few examples will serve to highlight the association and lay bare the rather esoteric concept behind it.

 

The Library

We start with the Library, because it’s in the Library that Doctor Who first starts to make use of this symbolism relatively unambiguously. In the first episode, Silence in the Library, we get the first death of the story, that of Miss Evangelista (oooh, what a name!) She wanders into a reading room, where several chairs take the center stage, and one in particular looks almost like a throne, with upholstery in TARDIS blue. The camera pans behind the chair, behind some books… and then a scream. Our heroes come racing into the room, and discover a skeleton sitting in the high-backed chair.

We then get one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the story, if not the season. Miss Evangelista isn’t just dead… she’s “ghosting.” A technobabble explanation is given, but the important thing is that her consciousness has been freed from her body, and yet is still present. It is a sobering experience for the others, especially Donna, and eventually Evangelista moves on… and when she does, the camera itself rises high above the tableau, its point of view delineating a literal ascension.

But Evangelista isn’t quite dead. Instead she’s been uploaded to the Library’s mainframe, which puts her through a queer looking glass. Before she died, she was pretty, but stupid. After, her features are grossly distorted, but her intelligence has gone through the roof.…

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Waking the Witch

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A little while ago, I said that I would write an essay of at least 1000 words, on any topic, for the first person to ask for one after I passed 500 followers on Twitter. I reached that milestone (hey, to me it’s a milestone) and immediately two people asked me simultaneously. One of them asked me to write about Kate Bush. So here goes.

‘Running Up That Hill’ has been called the greatest pop song ever.  Now, the rational part of my brain says “Clearly that’s rubbish, how can you quantify something like that?”  Thing is… ‘Running Up That Hill’ clearly is the greatest pop song ever created.  I mean, it just is.

There are a lot of cultural products which acquire a near universal reputation for greatness or importance owing to factors other than their intrinsic worth.  If your memory of the product in question were wiped, along with your memory of your youth, and all your knowledge of the critical consensus, and the agreed narrative of public opinion, and when you read or saw or heard it for the first time… chances are that, with a lot of things widely held to be significant, you’d pass over them without especially noticing them.

I am worried by how many of the things I love and rate would, I suspect, fall into that category… though it’s actually silly to imagine that you can evaluate anything divorced from the circumstances – personal, social, historical – in which you encounter it. But we all like to imagine that we possess a certain degree of objectivity, and we perhaps tend to flatter ourselves. I mean, I love Season 18 of Doctor Who. I adore it. And I would want to make claims for its objective quality. But can it entirely be a coincidence that it happened to be the first Doctor Who I ever saw? I suspect the answer is complex. I’m sure part of why I rate it is owing to nostalgia, and a deep imprint it made on my young, developing brain. But would it have had that impact had it not possessed something else? Something objectively intriguing in its imagery, etc?

I truly believe, however, that in a situation like the amnesia scenario I outlined above, Hounds of Love would still make most people stop and go “wow”.  Especially if listened to as part of a grand tour of the popular music of that year.

I think this because… well, it kind of happened to me.

I should go back a bit.  I’m going to give a personal account because… really what is there fresh to say about Kate Bush? I confess to being a bit dispirited when she was named as my topic. Not because I don’t love her, and not because she’s not interesting, but because its mostly all been said. Also, music – much as I love it – isn’t something I’m tremendously confident pontificating about. But here goes.

I first heard Kate Bush consciously when I listened to Peter Gabriel’s album So, which featured ‘Don’t Give Up’, her duet with Gabriel. …

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Thought and Memory (The Lost Vikings)

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They are, in truth, not lost, although they have gone far more astray than even Vinland. Were one to locate it on a map of genre, it would rest near Lemmings in the genre of action-puzzle. Like Lemmings, it is a game about navigating some characters through a series of traps to a goal. Also like Lemmings the characters are each given unique abilities. There are major differences – Lemmings’ central mechanic is based on the idea that the Lemmings are going to behave the same regardless of what you do, and on assigning special abilities to specific Lemmings at the right time, whereas The Lost Vikings gives you a trio of norsemen, each with their own special abilities, and has you alternate among controlling them. But the basic mechanic is the same.

First is Eric, swiftest of the Vikings, and the only one who can jump. Nominally, this means that he is the one with whom one explores the level to figure out what you’re supposed to do. And in this, he represents a crucial drive. Indeed, exploration is one of the basic types of gameplay in some models of how players interact with games, and it’s certainly one of the basic psychochronographic drives.

This is, perhaps, inherited from psychogeography, which is, after all, first and foremost a means of exploration. Although in both cases (as with Eric) it is not pure exploration, which is to say, it is not driven simply by a desire to find something that is new. Instead it is exploration in pursuit of a goal – a promised land, of sorts. The literalness of this shifts in context – Eric, for instance, very literally seeks a new land with every level, that being what an exit is. Similarly, the psychogeographer’s quest is necessarily defined by the physicality of land, even as they seek to conceptually reconfigure it, as opposed to abandoning it in favor of a new place. The psychochronographer, meanwhile, does not explore land in the conventional sense at all, instead looking for new modes of being and ideas.

In every case the pursuit is at its heart a tragedy. To find the promised land is always to despoil it. The psychochonorapher finds a new idea only to have it snap into place with relation to all other ideas, to become a spot on the psychic map like any other. The psychogeographer reconfigures space to his whims only to see it endlessly recuperated as the oppressive ordering of things takes hold. And even Eric will find that every exit is, in reality, simply an entrance to another map. Discovery is and always will be the death of exploration.

Although that one’s a bit dodgier with relation to The Lost Vikings. This is not so much because discovery is not the death of exploration as because there’s just so many other ways to die. The traps, generally speaking, aren’t a huge problem for Eric – more often than not, with his ability to jump, he’s actually the one who’s supposed to navigate those.…

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“Otaku Talk”: Rascals

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Somehow this shot seems familiar, but I can’t place it…

This is one of those stories where you really have to wonder what was going through the heads of the creative team. Call me a stick-in-the-mud or a killjoy all you want, but I find nothing whimsical or endearing about “Rascals” whatsoever. Instead, I think it’s utterly bonkers and it makes me cringe.

Ron Moore agrees with me:

“When Michael [Piller] bought the premise I thought he was completely insane: An Away Team rematerializes on the transporter as children — with adult minds! I tried again and again to bury this idea, which of course meant that I would get saddled with the inevitable rewrite when the script came in. I just thought it was a ludicrous idea and wanted nothing to do with it. That said, once I got the assignment, the professional writer in me had to commit to the material and do the best with it that I could, so I tried very hard to bring humor and humanity to the proceedings, chiefly through the Guinan/Ro story that I did end up liking in the end. I still cringe when I think of the episode (the Ferengi capture the Enterprise in a couple of broken down Birds of Prey???) but many people have told me how much they like it.”

Moore’s being terribly gracious to his fans here, as all Star Trek creative figures are, but he’s right. This is completely insane. And actually, I’m not even sure he manages to salvage it.

I think this is probably an episode that resonates differently with you depending on how old you are. Because I never remember finding “Rascals” to be unwatchable: Silly, yes, but I enjoyed seeing how Captain Picard was still competent and professional even as a 12-year old and how he devised a plan with Commander Riker on the sly to outwit the Ferengi (and it should give you an idea of calibre of this week’s outing if they’re giving us the *Ferengi* as antagonists. And that they couldn’t even bother to give us stock footage of their *own* ships). If you’re a kid watching this, I suppose you might find something empowering in that. I also had a faint notion that the Guinan/Laren story was supposed to be important character development and that I ought to at least humour that. The rewatch, though? Cringe after cringe.

The child actors…Are not the greatest this show has ever cast. But that’s a cheap shot. More worryingly, the plot is, plainly, inane. What exactly is this episode supposed to be about? To enjoy your youth while you have it? That kids are just as competent as adults, except not really? It doesn’t seem to have a coherent point beyond “let’s do some technobabble bullshit so we can de-age the characters it’d be the most fun to de-age”.…

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Weird Kitties Reviews, Batch Five (The Dark Forest, Ghost Champagne, The Gospel of Loki)

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The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
Reviewed by Philip Sandifer
 

Eligible for Best Novel and available for purchase here.

I had some reservations about The Three-Body Problem, although they’re as much sour grapes as genuine objections, and its merits were considerable. This, I think, is a stronger novel, and a strong candidate for my ballot. Liu constructs an interesting conceptual structure; an alien fleet is 450 years away from Earth and bent on destroying it. A MacGuffin exists whereby Earth is under constant and total surveilance by the aliens and unable to produce any scientific advancements in theoretical physics, thus more or less locking technology more or less into variations of what’s on contemporary Earth (with a few exceptions when it furthers the plot such as cryonics). 

The novel follows a couple of cunning plans unfolding over about 250 years of future history, the main one of which also unfolds along a novel explanation of the Fermi paradox that doubles as a theory of interstellar relations. This is not to say it’s a theory original to Liu - I’ve no idea there – but it’s not one that’s been overdone in stories about aliens. And that’s the basic and real appeal of this, I think. Throughout it, there’s just a genuine feeling of innovation. There’s a fresh feeling to even the hoariest of old sci-fi tropes here. It feels fresh like one imagines Asimov and Clarke did in their days. One suspects – though it’s outside my area of expertise to conclude – that a fair part of this is that we haven’t really seen a Chinese perspective on these genre conventions before, but whatever the reason, it works well.

The book’s heftier than it’s predecessor, and probably doesn’t work well if you haven’t read it, but it’s a solid and interesting science fiction novel in the grand and classical sense, which is a nice thing to see. It never drags in its length, and Liu comes up with a fresh idea often enough to keep things moving. I ended up wolfing the bulk of it down in a nice autumn evening under the blankets with a few pots fof tea and absolutely loving it, and can’t wait for the last book of the set in January. 

Ghost Champagne by Charlie Jane Anders
Reviewed by William Shaw
 
Eligible for Best Short Story, and available here
 
I mean, the title is brilliant just on its own.
 
‘Ghost Champagne’ may well be the best short story of Charlie Jane Anders’ career so far, which, as our host has pointed out in the past, is really saying something. Anders is fond of dusting off old storytelling standards, and so it becomes tempting to fall back on old reviewing standards when describing her work; I laughed, I cried, I was moved unlike anything else I have read this year, etcetera, etfuckingcetera. But while that may be an accurate summation of my reaction, the fact is that no review of this story can possibly be as engaging as the story itself.
…

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Under the Lake Review

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It’s tempting to call it ruthlessly traditional Doctor Who. I don’t think it is, mind you, but it’s certainly tempting to call it that. What it definitely is, however, is oddly procedural Doctor Who. There’s very little time spent on theme-building; even the big Doctor/Clara scene that the episode contrives to have them nip back to the TARDIS for is more just a character piece than something that feels like a heavily built thematic piece. And there’s not a heck of a lot of time spent building characters – the base crew are pretty underdeveloped compared to, say, Last Christmas, The Rebel Flesh, or The Impossible Planet, to the point where the Doctor rallying them to stay and explore the church feels slightly unearned as a scene. There’s not even a ton of plot. I mean, lots of things happen, but it’s no The Magician’s Apprentice or Dark Water, nor even The Rebel Flesh. Actually, one really has to rack one’s brain to think of the last time a whole episode was used to set up a premise this straightforward. The Sontaran Stratagem?

No, even that has more moving parts than this, an episode that is more interested in lengthy scenes in which characters watch grainy green-tinged footage on a computer monitor or an extended corridor relay race than in what we normally describe as “doing anything” in television. I don’t think I’ve ever wondered so much what the Tumblr gifset crowd is going to make of an episode.

The real answer to the question, then, is probably… ooh, Curse of Fenric 1? (Survival has a pretty complex premise.) Or hell, the last actual proper base under siege, Warriors of the Deep 1? Certainly you have to look to the classic series to find anything as willing to spend quite this long on people fiddling with machines on a BBC soundstage. It’s just not something Doctor Who does much, as television. For the most part this has generally struck me as a good thing, although there’s certainly a brand of traditionalism that would say otherwise.

And yet there’s no obvious reference point for this in the classic series. It doesn’t feel like a McCoy story or a Davison story. It’s tempting to call anything that’s a base under siege a Troughton story, but no, this isn’t how one of those works or feels either. Indeed, its basic formula is unmistakably a new series standard – the action-heavy setup to a premise-changing cliffhanger.

The result makes a credible claim to being Whithouse’s best work in years, and I think actually shows a really interesting perspective on the series. Recall that Whithouse, when he debuted on the series nearly a decade ago, noted that he’d not been a classic series fan. Indeed, and this is a fact that I don’t think has been remarked upon much, he was the first new series writer for whom their episode was the first Doctor Who they’d ever done; the literal first of the new school.…

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